Why should it pain you? The field is called “serious games”, look up Clark Aldrich’s stuff and books, for instance. Office notwithstanding, it’s the best thing that could happen to learning.
may i point you to this: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2010/02/the_game-ified.php
— Dan 
You’ve probably seen this already, but just on the off chance that you haven’t – Jesse Schell gave an interesting presentation on this topic at DICE 2010: http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/
— Christoph
I’m one of those 32k that has downloaded Ribbon Hero, and because of me, probably a couple of dozen others have as well. I used to be a student instructor for the Microsoft Office class at my university. I saw Ribbon Hero from somewhere and downloaded it to try it out. While I couldn’t use it, I passed it along to the director of the program, who in turn let about 250 students know. It’s not really the worst game ever, because if you are trying to learn Office and the RibbonUI, it’s instant feedback with no human interaction. That feedback is handy when there’s no instructor around to ask.
— Daniel
I don’t really understand it either – I never played many games either – and now I get motion sick even using Second Life. But isn’t this the way we all are anyway? Humans tend to make games/competitions out of everything. And then in an ultimately completely banal maneuver, organizations targeting the lowest common denominator process will then institutionalize a bunch of “games” in some glorious industrial-era control grab. (or maybe for the more well-meaning it’s a jobs program for the person that gets to create all the memos and hold all the meetings about the rules). Not that I’m jaded or anything.
At the end of the day, collecting the gold coins is probably going to be more fun than making sure I’ve completed all my TPS forms so that get my “Certificate of Achievement”.
[Achievement unlocked: Comment Collector] Your blog post has received 5 comments!
Just to be clear, Space Invaders Enterprise Edition really was not a joke. Really! The name was, but the underlying idea of extracting game rules out into a rule-based programming environment was not :)
DISCLAIMER: I was the author of Space Invaders EE.
Conveniently following Chris here – I’m the author of Unit Testing Achievements. While the idea originated from a joke, it’s very much a working test runner. So far it’s been a big hit!
Okay, I’ve updated the post to indicate that neither of your projects are jokes.
— Mark
Office notwithstanding, it’s the best thing that could happen to learning.
Except that’s the problem: Office. I don’t want my kids learning Microsoft Office. I don’t want anyone learning Microsoft Office. Yeah, I know, tilting at the windmill…
— Mark
[Achievement unlocked: Comment Collector] Your blog post has received 5 comments!
Does any publishing platform actually do this? Or perhaps the reverse: are there any bloggy-type sites that track this for you as a visitor? “Achievement: commented on five different posts.” “Achievement: read ten posts with the tag ‘lighthouse’.” I see a project in my future…
— Mark
“Does any publishing platform actually do this?”
such a good idea!